Thoughts on the February 11, 2015 PASS Town Hall

I missed the first part of the Town Hall as I had a meeting that ended at 1 pm, but I saw most of it and wanted to share some early thoughts:

Excited to see this happen, good step in governance, transparency, and communication

Wasn’t well advertised (but I get it was the first one, it should get better)

Along those lines, attendance seemed really low. Board members, don’t be discouraged. Advertise it more and don’t sweat the count, listen for the pain and the ideas

Denise read most of the comments/questions and that was good, but I have to admit I liked hearing Ryan Adams actually speak his question. Maybe a mix of that.

Would be nice to be able to submit questions in advance

They seemed to be monitoring Twitter during the meeting as well, good

Not the best place for deep discussions. Had one about NomCom and it’s an important topic. I like hearing differing views and I don’t mind hearing some of them live, but it can’t be solved in the meeting

Reminds me again how hard communication is, the part about whether/if/how to report actual vs planned budget spend and at what level. Getting to a shared understanding of the problem is the key, right?

I’m looking forward to seeing the transcript

Definitely need a landing page and archives and all the rest

Handling the follow will be interesting. Typically we only hear about the answers/results to Q&A a year later. Hoping is sooner for these!

I submitted a couple questions to help keep things going and to get clarification. One I framed badly, they were discussing Summit abstracts and volumes and my question – revised here – was “why don’t we reduce the number of abstracts that a speaker can submit to 1 or 2, instead of 4? That’s worth a blog post to go deeper and I’ll try to do that this week. I also asked a question about the Volunteer page and how it’s linked to SQLSaturday. Just to add to that, SQLSaturday as a task/volunteer management system built it. I’m not clear on if/when that will be integrated into the PASS volunteer portal?

Good first effort. Good effort period I’d say. Advertise it, do some posts to extend answers or explain the resolution, members will be well served.